Nineteenth-century coal towns produced a massive surplus of world-class scientists and engineers.
April 20, 2026
Original Paper
The European Coal Blessing
SSRN · 6601555
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The Takeaway
Proximity to fossil fuel deposits did more than just power factories during the Industrial Revolution. This resource proximity actually accelerated the development of high level human intelligence. Most economists talk about the resource curse where natural wealth ruins a local economy. In early Europe, the presence of coal created a coal blessing that funded education and technical training. The infrastructure built to move coal became the foundation for a new class of intellectual elites. This finding suggests that energy density was a direct driver of the STEM revolution.
From the abstract
This paper investigates whether historical natural resource endowments fostered or hindered the accumulation of upper-tail human capital. Using a novel city-level dataset of over 13,000 eminent scientists and engineers across 19th-century Europe, we demonstrate that proximity to historical coalfields significantly increased local scientific and technological innovation. To establish causality, we utilize a control function approach with the presence of Carboniferous-era rock strata as an instrum